Posted
by
kdawson
on Thursday July 19, 2007 @10:27AM
from the ascendent-fox dept.

Kevin Spiritus lets us know that XiTi Monitor, a French Web survey institute, has published its browser barometer for July, and Internet Explorer continues to lose ground. "The ascension of Firefox continues... Nearly 28% average use rate in Europe in the beginning of July 2007, with a progression in the totality of the 32 European countries studied. Firefox doesn't loose ground in any of the countries."

Oh come on, let's not loose site of the things that defiantly matter here. We can play fast and lose with the little facts so much as we get the big ones write everyday. I wonder if alot of people woulda even noticed the affect of a little mispelling like that.

"Mozilla's Firefox web browser has made dramatic gains on Microsoft's Internet Explorer throughout Europe in the past year with a marked upturn in FF use compared to IE over the past four months, according to French web monitoring service XiTiMonitor. A study of nearly 96,000 websites carried out during the week of July 2 to July 8 found that FF had 27.8% market share across Eastern and Western Europe, IE had 66.5%, with other browsers including Safari and Opera making up the remaining 5.7%. In some key European markets FF has already reached parity and is threatening to overtake IE as the market leading browser."

From the current blurb:

Kevin Spiritus lets us know that XiTi Monitor, a French Web survey institute, has published its browser barometer for July, and Internet Explorer continues to lose ground. "The ascension of Firefox continues... Nearly 28% average use rate in Europe in the beginning of July 2007, with a progression in the totality of the 32 European countries studied. Firefox doesn't loose ground in any of the countries."

I realize we have the Firehose now but are people who read Slashdot daily using it properly? We don't need two stories in a short time frame (4 days) about the same topic.

Methodology:
Firefox's use rate corresponds to the totality of Firefox visits during the period in relation to the entirety of visits, all browsers taken together.

They don't explain what "visits" means. Does it mean visits to *their* site? Did they poll a random number of site owners? I'm sorry, but unless they can provide some supporting information, then these statistics are meaningless.

They don't explain what "visits" means. Does it mean visits to *their* site? Did they poll a random number of site owners? I'm sorry, but unless they can provide some supporting information, then these statistics are meaningless.

I don't think they're meaningless. Inaccurate maybe. I can see how users of Firefox would visit certain sites more often than users of other browsers, and that could skew the numbers.

Methodology:
Firefox's use rate corresponds to the totality of Firefox visits during the period in relation to the entirety of visits, all browsers taken together.

They don't explain what "visits" means. Does it mean visits to *their* site? Did they poll a random number of site owners? I'm sorry, but unless they can provide some supporting information, then these statistics are meaningless.

Basically, they have what they call markers (actually small images) on literally millions of Websites

What they call "markers", the rest of the world calls web bugs [eff.org].

A lot of personal proxies (such as Privoxy) filter out crap like this. The kind of user that would use a product like Privoxy is also the kind of user that would tend to use Firefox. Makes me wonder if the Firefox numbers might not actually be a little higher overall.

This is a hard one for non-native English speakers, because "lose" is pronounced so bizarrely it sounds like it needs two Os. However, "loose" is how we describe poor security, and "lose" is what happens when I try to play one of these newfangled video games. FYI, FWIW.

Gotta love english, dose doesn't fit either fwiw.Doze is pronounced the same as pose, nose etc.Dose is pronounced like close, but only if you mean close as in near. Close as in 'close up shop' is like doze.What a mess;)

English isn't so much a set of rules as it is a set of exceptions.

My biggest english hangup is with archive...having been taught phonetically I always say ar-CHive, like 'chive', when it should be pronounced as arkive. I know this, I always think this when I say it, but it always comes out l

Allow me to translate into non-baby-talk.In English English (the Queen's, I guess), they say the word "schedule" as shed-jule.In American English (or the highway, bitches), we say the same word as sked-jule.

It's not enough of a difference to make the word difficult to understand in everyday speech, but just enough difference to make everyone in earshot of the "foreign" way giggle when they hear it. Especially us "dumb" Americans, since we like to make fun of anything that sounds different (including each ot

you can use "booze" as a verb (i.e. "boozing it up"... a person who boozes is said to be a "boozer") so what is it's past tense? "boozed" or "bost"? i would wager it is "boozed" therefore, the past tense of "looze" would be "loozed".

While I am technically a non-native speaker being an Indian (Disclaimer: I did not derkejeeerrbs), english was the first language I learnt. I have noticed that people who speak british english tend to accept anomalies in english more than american english speakers. To be honest, I never thought of how strange the pronunciation of 'lose' was until I tried to find more examples and all I could think of was words like rose,hose,dose,chose etc... It is indeed an odd pronunciation, but it never seemed strange. M

'refrigideezer' is not a word while 'Aluminium' is the IUPAC spelling and is widely used in scientific literature outside America. There is a huge difference between the two situations. Moreover, I am not against the use of 'Aluminum'. I have accepted that a lot of people call it that and do not object to its use in any way. I personally prefer the use of 'Aluminium' since I like it better.

I've given up on worrying about what non-native speakers do to English. Over the years of knowing many non-native speakers, I've figured out the ways in which English makes no sense to them, and the way in which they make odd-sounding conjugations etc are perfectly reasonable in terms of how their own language works and how they were taught English (mostly). They're usually following a perfectly reasonable rule -- as a friend points out, his English is w

Oh, and here I was feeling relieved that Firefox did not set free any ground to rampage across the countryside, destroying houses, pillaging, etc. (You know, as ground is wont to do.) I think Firefox's popularity might suffer if it did that.

1. This story is a dupe2. Yay firefox... but honestly is it all that important? How about discussing ways we can actually get firefox to perform better? Now that's a conversation actually worth having, but it might involve thinking instead of rabid fanboyism & MS hatred, so don't expect to see it on Slashdot.3. For the last freakin' time: Your mom is loose, you are just a loser can you finally get it right!!??!?!?!!

How about discussing ways we can actually get firefox to perform better?

We can make it perform better by using adblocking extensions as well as NoScript and a handful of other addons. They (i.e. Mozilla) are working on making Firefox itself perform better, and they are progressing quite well. I have installed Gran Paradiso (Firefox 3 Alpha) in Windows on my home desktop, and it can give IE7 a run for its money, performance-wise.

I'm sure I'll get bashed but have you seen the amount of software that also tries to install Firefox with itself from Adobe Acrobat to Divx all have Firefox set to default install themselves. Applications that in no way using a internet browser now have firefox in the installers, why is this? I'm glad we will be getting more browser competition but are firefox's methods any better than Microsofts?

Better maybe not, but necessary yes...If everyone else plays dirty, you have to aswell, otherwise you lose.If we get to a position where browsers are standards compliant, and compete on product quality... It benefits everyone in the end.

While I prefer Firefox myself, I got into trouble with both IE and Firefox. As a hobby project, I run a website [mensafuchs.de] about my university cafeteria: You can retrieve the menu there in various forms, including a web page, RSS feeds, and a CSV interface. For this interface, I created a firefox extension using XUL. If you want to try it, be warned: XUL documentation is either non existing, or outdated. developing consisted mainly of trial and error (and of course skimming other extension, which probably did the sam

The about:config setting you're looking for is config.trim_on_minimize. Set this true.

I think this raises a point, though, in relation to browser share. The majority of users do not want to have to tweak anything. If they need to change Firefox configs in order to match performance under IE7, most would instead go back to IE7.[1]

Personally, I don't think browser share is the ultimate measure of how good a browser Firefox is. The only reason why I think it's important that FF and other browsers eat away

I think this raises a point, though, in relation to browser share. The majority of users do not want to have to tweak anything. If they need to change Firefox configs in order to match performance under IE7, most would instead go back to IE7.[1]

As far as that goes, any software developer knows that when it comes to performance, you can maximize for size or speed, but not both. In this case, FF chose to optimize for speed, rather than size, but left a config option for those who would rather they had taken

Font appearance is a personal taste issue, although I cant tell the difference. How are you measuring RAM usage? Because it isn't the amount of RAM in the task manager you want to worry about. What you need to find out is what do the applications do when the system is low on resources. If firefox is a good little application and surrenders that RAM when the system needs it, then it doesn't matter if it is 'using' it at other times.

I've found on my work PC (Win XP, 3 GB RAM) that once Firefox goes past 250 MB of memory it starts choking when switching tabs or navigating pages. The trick of minimizing Firefox appears to free up memory at first, but soon after restoring the window it's past 200 MB and choking again.The last time this happened I quit my other memory-hogging processes (dev environment, GIMP, etc), it didn't help. Restarting Firefox did--thankfully all my dozen or so tabs were restored.

Just a suggestion, but you might want to try Opera. It's smaller and faster than its rivals.

But, as others have pointed out, MSIE is known for not reporting memory usage correctly, so it's very hard to make like for like memory usage comparisons based solely on the numbers reported by Task Manager.

66.6 - some may say that is as it should be, but as some regard IE as the de facto standard after all these years, it is quite a good thing for some downward pressure on the market share since that would urge Microsoft to make IE less complaint-worthy. I use IE, as it is almost good enough for what I'm doing and I'm so used to it. However, this news is making me think quite seriously of trying Firefox although I believe the web sites that I favor have been designed to have to work in IE.My biggest complaint

Even there, 'loose' is not the word they want. Loose in that sense is still a different word. If you take that definition, the sentance would have approximate meaning (in modern langauge) of "Internet Explorer continues to liberate dirt." which seems to be a fancy way of calling IE a plow.

My weapon of choice has been Privoxy. Pretty much what you suggest rolled into one, but without the need to disable JS altogether. So far, it's been quite able to block anything that offers a threat to FF.

Question is just how long. If there's a market, it will become interesting.

Funny enough, Privoxy is quite "intelligent" when it comes to blocking. I didn't have time to go through its source yet, but my guess is that it does a combination of URL based filtering (anything with "ad" in its name has a hard time coming through) along with behaviour based filtering. It's surprisingly accurate when it comes to determining whether the incoming traffic is something you want or something that bugs you. It only fails when sites behave like advertisers (i.e. when a page tries to open a popup

Firefox's market share may be of primary interest to web developers, but it's also relevant to the general OSS and Mac user communities as well.

Why? Because IE isn't just another browser. It's a Windows-only browser with proprietary features (ActiveX, etc.) that promotes lock-in. So lots of people care about IE's market share, and lots of people, for all sorts of selfish resons, want IE to fail.

As a web developer, the only browser share stat I care about is the decline of IE6. I can develop a website that works in safari, opera, firefox, and IE7 without pain or suffering. I then have to take 10 times as long to get it to work in IE6. Hoping for "standard browser engine" is stupid because we already *have* standards that all of the other major browsers are obeying; all we need to do is get rid of the non-standards-conformant browser that currently has ~40% market share. This is why any decline